bit dojo

Meta Cart is a small, elegant shopping cart application built with Ruby on Rails, sprinkled with Ajax and eye-catching visual effect goodness. It is named after our old domain meta0.net.

Note: Presently this project is not open source nor available for public downloads. There seems to be another similarly named application out there, but this project is not associated with it whatsoever.

Features

Store front: Ajax shopping cart, with fallback support when client has JavaScript disabled; eye-catching visual effects.

Control panel: Ajax in-place editing of system settings and translations; Textile markup for easy text formatting.

Multilingual user interface.

Origin

One of my friends in Taiwan has a client that runs a nice little Mediterranean restaurant, and they have some desserts they want to sell online.

Although there are some existing cart applications, I feel most of them are too complex, and something custom built would be better, easier to fit the store. This is also a great opportunity for me to learn Rails.

Screenshots

Demo

A demo is available where you can check out the store front, play with the control panel, and reset the database. It might be a good idea to do a reset before you try it - who knows who has been messing around?

Copyright Notice

The product images you see in the demo are real product images from a real store. They will be using Meta Cart to sell their products when it is ready. The store have allowed us to use the images for design and testing purposes, but not for any other use.

So, for your eyes only, please.

Note that the demo is configured to run in resource friendly “cheap mode” (dynamic fast-cgi), so it might take a while to boot up if it has not been used for some time. Update: Now the server has been updated to run Rails using Passenger for blazing action - it’s so good that it’s boring…!

Now for the fun stuff, please see the demo page.

Demo version: svn-r78_branch-tr

Credits

Store front style designed by my friend Tony Xia.